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Enjoy a saucy sexy read with this collection of modern romantic erotic fiction!

Named after a rare butterfly, the extraordinary new film by Peter Strickland is also that lesser-spotted creature: a genuinely erotic British film.

The feminist writer is in for more than she could imagine.

And although they’re more overtly erotic, can we call the likes of Deep End (1970), Bitter Moon (1992), Breaking the Waves (1996) and Intimacy (2001) ‘British’ given complex co-production funding, multinational casts and directors hailing from Poland, France and Denmark?

Most were neither sexy nor funny, and this one isn’t particularly erotic either, but it does cast a keenly satirical eye on how the sex-film business was run at the time, with wide-eyed ingénues on both sides of the camera and a plot that contrives multiple adaptations of the notoriously filthy poem to please different backers: hardcore porn, a gay western, a kung-fu musical and a family-friendly compromise.

The martyrdom of Saint Sebastian had been a key erotic symbol in western art for many centuries before Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress’s cinematic take.

One of the most sexually explicit films then made in Britain, it begins with an aggressively symbolic dance performed by Lindsay Kemp’s troupe wearing giant phalluses before decamping to a remote garrison where various Roman soldiers either suppress or give in to their various homosexual urges.

The amount of frontal male nudity was unprecedented in British cinema for the time: a blatant erection slipped past the BBFC thanks to cunning framing subterfuge during the official inspection.